RE: cost of peer review and electronic distribution of scholarly papers

["Nawin" <nawin.gupta@comcast.net>]

Costs associated with the steps from article submission through 
initial evaluation and peer review, and taking the accepted 
articles through editorial process and getting it ready to 
publish vary widely from publisher to publisher: journal type and 
discipline, rigor and quality of work, nature and size of 
content, labor costs, and how the work is done, for example. 
Based on my experience with the journals I have worked with over 
the years, I have seen these costs range from $2,500 to $8,000 
per research article published for medical journals.  And this 
does not include value of peer reviewer time.  That said, most of 
us are aware of publishers whose costs are as low as $500 per 
article published for STM journals.

Nawin Gupta
nawin.gupta@comcast.net

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 5:03 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: The cost of peer review and electronic distribution of
scholarly papers

I don't know of any such research offhand, but I would hope that 
it would provide a true calculation of faculty time devoted to 
this task by pro-rating faculty salaries (including benefits 
costs) based on averages published by, say, The Chronicle of 
Higher Education annually. I would hope that it would also fully 
assess the costs involved in operating sophisticated editorial 
managements systems that many publishers now use, again on some 
kind of pro-rated basis. For copyediting, it should not be too 
difficult to arrive at a rate per page copyedited based on the 
average hourly rate for copyediting these days of between $25 and 
$30. This latter cost would not seem to be encompassed by either 
categories (a) or (b), but it is an important cost of value added 
that is too often overlooked.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>Dear All,
>
>I am trying to establish (in the specific context of scholarly
>journals) whether anyone knows of any research that has been
>undertaken to establish the dollar cost of a) implementing the
>peer review of a scholarly paper, b) distributing a scholarly
>paper electronically.
>
>If so, I would be grateful for details of what the estimated
>costs were, and links to any papers/reports that were produced as
>a result of that research (if they are available on an OA basis).
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Richard Poynder
>www.richardpoynder.co.uk